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bungalow16
Reviews
A Quiet Passion (2016)
A chore.
Reverent to a fault. There's just no cinema in this. And it doesn't really work as good theater either. A very stiff lifeless rendering of a great poet. It takes more than some candlelight to stir our embers. Cynthia Nixon in a thankless role: Look homely and die! The director has died so we can say bluntly this is a complete failure, reading her poems in voice over like a crap video in the viewing room at the Dickenson museum. I question what this filmmaker knew about passion. I see no evidence on screen. I suggest William Wyler's the Heiress or Bette Davis in Old Maid. This movie made me mad. Can you tell?
My Darling Clementine (1946)
Casts such a spell.
I find this film entrancing. Smoke rising. The desert at night. Clouds at midnight. This new (to us) version is quieter, less score. I would love to be out there on that porch, tilting my chair back, waiting for the stage to come in. Beautiful transfer on the DVD, I found myself struck, moved by frame after frame. The sound of a single horse across monument valley, the fury of Doc Holiday's stage coach tearing through the landscape. A lamp-lit bar and a woman moaning under the knife, like a dying ember. Three figures stepping out like giants into the landscape. Robert Ryan seated in the wind and dust at the end of the Wild Bunch, it all comes from here. There is so much to learn from this film.